To bring to life our vision we must be prepared to sacrifice a piece of ourselves, what that exactly entails is usually up to the one who sees the picture unfold before them, to the writer, it arguably something more, for the piece of art they are creating remains in the dark, unseen, hidden away and perhaps only glimpsed at during moments of inspiration or melancholy; for the Missing Beat to which the writer lives in is one that millions want to feel but few are willing to actually live with.

A musician will send themselves crazy in search of meaning in the elusive second difficult album, a writer will often never immerse themselves into the shadows again, the depth in which they once waded becoming a warning to not stray into such raging waters again. Some though will not only see the sign as a challenge, but voluntarily rip the sign out of the murky waters of the mind and show others that there is nothing to fear in diving into your fears.

The subject matter is perhaps unimportant, the belief in your character, that of the protagonist and your own, is the overriding thought to which we should seek out the hardy vessel to aid us in our passage and it is one that Liverpool’s Bob Stone exemplifies with a sense of grandness, of purpose, as he talks freely about the sequel to the successful and incredible Missing Beat.

Unlike many writers, Bob Stone does not shy away from the public, his position as a respected book shop owner at the heart of the community in Waterloo keeps him occupied, keeps him in touch with the audience that is out there for all writers to engage with. Bob though uses his time to hear the sound that haunts and thrills that come between the missing beat, and now in the sequel, Beat Surrender, that sense of striding purposely through the swell of the tide and going deeper into the mind of the author is not just apparent, it is essential, captivating and one clothed in truth.

Missing Beat Part II effectively – how does that feel?

BOB: “Weird!”

I mean, you haven’t taken it from a Jam album title at all, have you?

BOB: “Absolutely not! There are no subtle Jam references that have sneaked into the book whatsoever but there are Easter Eggs to be fair, if people care to look.”

It is very much in the science fiction mode, as you have alluded to before, you are a big Doctor Who fan but you have also delved into other things and genres – comic books and graphic novels. There is an underlying nature with this, with shall we say, alternate versions of Earth like in the first book but more pronounced, I am thinking of an episode called Inferno specifically with the evil Miss Shaw and the evil Brigadier.

BOB: “I stopped short of the eye-patches but yes, it was interesting to think about how one small thing can change the directions of people’s lives and I just had to make the characters different particularly for those characters of which there were two floating around so that was quite fun to experiment with and the different versions.”

It certainly came across in the exposition from nurse, to politician to police officer – the caring side and the authoritarian.

BOB: “Yes, the one tried to sort the problem out and the other dealing with the effect of the problem, that was one of those things that just happened – I thought that was a good idea and it worked I think.”

Very much so and it was also the dichotomy of the young lad, for example, Wanda Maximoff in The Avengers is described as a nexus being, in other words, in all possible realities she exists but in your reality, what you have done is that there is only one version at all – the protagonist. There is no counterbalance to him.

BOB: “No, it is hinted at in the second book”

With the fact that he dies in that world…

BOB: “… but we do learn in book two that he is the same person in all the other worlds – he is the only one and we also find out why.”

Is this a teaser? Is that set in stone, is that is as far as it will be?

BOB: “That is as far as it goes, I’m at the point of writing book three at the moment and I am trying to pull all the threads together and find all the threads that I had left dangling. I have just described it as trying to re-knit a pullover that has been mauled by a goat! There are threads everywhere but what is interesting about it is that I’m suddenly finding things that I did not think were relevant but suddenly they are relevant and when people read book three, they will think I did it deliberately.”

Do you not think subconsciously that you may have done that?  

BOB: “Not the way I write! Of course, it is possible, it was all purely subconscious, intended all along.”

I do not think personally that I could write a trilogy and keep it within that very tight frame without letting a dozen questions go past, as if for example, Lord of the Rings, there are questions and questions and questions as there are always other books that could be passible. To tighten it up and to keep it to three, has that been a mark of dedication to the characters and the books other than your own choice?

BOB: “I have not 100 per cent decided quite how open the end is going to be, it largely depends on when I get there, how fed up with them all I am. Whether it is a dead stop or full stop, the end or whether there will be any potential for continuing into books four, five, six, seven and further and to be honest, it depends how they sell.”

It is interesting to hear you say fed up, I know we are very much alike on this and we both admire Stephen King and there are elements again, I remember at your launch night you were talking about something and you mentioned The Stand, do you think as a writer you can get fed up with your characters? Do you think in terms of our mutual hero, Stephen King that he would have got fed up with Trashcan Man for example?

BOB: “I used the term fed up with – I used the term when I mean there is no more mileage, when you are writing about teenage characters and you assume that they make it to the end of the series, they are only young. It is quite an interesting thought to think what they might be doing in five years’ time – grown up, I don’t know yet, I really don’t. Going back to Mr. King, what I do like is for example, when you open a new Stephen King book and you realise that it’s set on or near Castle Rock – we’re on familiar ground, it’s set in the same universe broadly, it’s just nice when you find that you’re on familiar territory, so whether there is a broader world within the one I’ve created that still needs exploring, I don’t know. There is a lot of mythology effectively that is only touched on in a small way.”

There does seems to be, you say small but if you read between the lines, there seems to be a great allusion to Greek mythology certainly, the Demon in the cell from the first book – there is a lot of fire and exposition to him.

BOB: “I think there’s a lot of familiar tropes of mythology anyway. It’s always been a thought of mine that so many different cultures develop their own mythologies and religions effectively and how remarkably similar they are and how can that be?”

The Mayans and the Egyptians with their pyramids for example, how does that span across five thousand miles?

BOB: “There’s also virtually every religion has some sort of father/son relationship, they are stories that people would recognise but within the world of my books, there is. I had a conversation with my brother who after he read Missing Beat, suggested I look at Gnosticism and I found that I had accidently used that as the basis of the mythology in mine. The idea that there is the “big boss” isn’t the Creator and he sub-contracts that to Archons who are effectively civil servants and are not that competent but also like to interfere and are very bureaucratic and I suddenly realised that was what I had done but then that means we only see two of the beings involved whether there are more of their stories to be told I don’t know.”

It would be interesting to see how they carry on from there if you do that, it would be a different tack, if you like.

BOB: “Without giving anything away, when you get to the end of Beats Surrender, you will realise that there is only one of them but I quite like the idea.”

Now, you say that but is there really only just one of them? I read that part intently and I got the feeling that it’s smoke and mirrors, shall we say?

BOB: “At the point when I wrote it, the intention was that but when I realised that I was going to write book three I knew that I’d shot myself in the foot but I quite like the idea that there is a level of moral ambiguity there, that they are not necessarily good or bad in their approach in a way. We learn a little bit more about Saunders in book three, you find out exactly what he’s doing and why he’s doing it and what he’s after and what the book is.”

There was a moment for me in the second book where I actually found relieved in many ways. I know it’s a book mainly aimed at young adults, the fact that you sort of left behind the two younger children to only appear in abstract thought, part in the middle of the book and then at the end, however, good characters are and they are both very good, it worried me as a father to children, although they are grown up now, with the idea of manipulation within children from a higher perspective whereas you don’t do that much in the second book.

BOB: “No, I started to but then I pulled away from it slightly.”

I don’t know if I’m reading it wrong but that’s how it came across.

BOB: “I found basically that within -.bless their little hearts -.that having created Evan and Ruby in the first place, they became more and more of a burden as the book went on – trying to find what to do with them and obviously what not to with them. By the time I started writing the second book, I realised that there probably wasn’t a place for them as such but then I also thought that they did needed to appear and then they became a plot thread. They have a substantially bigger role in book three but again, without giving too much away, book three starts in 2025, so they’ve grown up and now you can do more with them.”

You can see my point about the unease that you perceive when you’re thinking about children in an adult world.

BOB: “They are also extremely difficult to write, I found them problematic in book two which is why they don’t appear until halfway through and there was some internal debate as to whether they were going to appear at all. The only reason they started to appear was the end of Beat Surrender was going to be substantially different and the way that it was going to be substantially different was I had to get the characters that we knew from Missing Beat off there – off the world as I was going to destroy it, that was the initial plan – that the world that they were on was going to end as the one in Missing Beat does. All the good characters had to get off there, in which case, I had to put them all in the same place so I had to bring Evan and Ruby back into it but then I realised that they still didn’t have too much place in the story so they were kind of side-lined.”

You do come across as, I only had the pleasure of knowing you for about four years now, but you do come across as a very thoughtful man and especially with your writing whereas I’m more a spur of the moment, stream of consciousness writer. You do seem to plan a lot more and scrap an idea if it’s not working.

BOB: “In some ways, I might be too cautious at times, there are things that I’ve shied away from and there have been some difficulties. I’m not sure how controversial I should get, it’s simply people have praised the books for being inclusive, in all manners and ways, which creates a problem in itself, the nature of the story means that bad things happen to people and sometimes I have probably over-thought which people I can and cannot have bad things done to them in case it looks like I’m picking on them, which has caused me substantial problems by making Raj both Asian and gay, which means I can’t do anything to him at all! I do over-think things like that.”

It was pretty gruesome, not giving too much away but his counterbalance shall we say in this world or that world, does die really horribly!

BOB: “Yes, I could do that as the real one was still going, that was fine, it wasn’t one of the characters that we knew, it was another version of him but as long as one was o.k. that was fine.”

Again, going back to Inferno, let’s be fair, it’s one of the greatest Doctor Who stories of all time because it dared to go into that strange place of other worldliness and alternate universes. Do you not think a reader will look at that and think that’s still Raj? It doesn’t matter that it’s a different Raj, it’s still Raj. It’s like if there were two points of view, we should still mourn that person if they go.

BOB: “Kind of, it is the Inferno thing, that’s why I introduced and dispatched the alternate Raj quite quickly so that we couldn’t get attached to him and whereas in Inferno, there’s five or six episodes where you get to know the alternate versions of the people on the other world and then they all get dispatched very rapidly in a blaze of magma which actually seemed a bit more cruel because they were people we had to got to know. Liz Shaw’s character was much more interesting than Liz Shaw was on our world certainly, she was a much more morally ambiguous character and they developed her character I think more in the few episodes that she was then than they did in the whole of the series which is again a clever thing to do. The good thing about dealing with alternate worlds is that you can always kill people off – it just depends which one you kill.”

You haven’t gone down the route of another classic in terms of that genre which is Sliders and they killed off quite a major character about five or six series in quite quickly  if I remember rightly – Quinn who was supposed to be point of the story but you haven’t thankfully done that.

BOB: “Yet”…And three quarters of the way through and we’re starting to edit it.”

That’s impressive! Is there going to be anything after it?

BOB: “I don’t know!”

I don’t mean in terms of the Beat Surrender series, is there going to be a different take on books?

BOB: “I sincerely hope so!”

An autobiography of someone famous perhaps?

BOB: “Not yet, whilst working on book three which has the working title of Beat Generation by the way; it waivers between that and Perfect Beat, Perfect Beat to keep the musical reference.”

I can see a bit of a Who reference going on there.

BOB: “The Beat Generation was my brother’s suggestion because he said it sounded like a good one, but it deals with the characters in the future as well that seems work. Whilst I’m working on that I’m also writing a grown-up horror novel which concerns. It actually started years ago, it was going to be a missing Doctor Who story where I was going to create a new organisation that was going to run parallel to U.N.I.T. which was the Department for Paranormal Affairs, kind of X-Files which had been set up by the Government with the brief to investigate the paranormal.

The subtext was that they would try and disprove the paranormal but of course they don’t and I’d started writing this book which was a 1970s Jon Pertwee/U.N.I.T. story but involved this Department of Paranormal Affairs who are given the disparaging title of the Graveyard Shift but it also deals with elements from the Mabinogion which has always fascinated me, I’ve always loved the Mabinogion, because the legends in it are insane, some of the stories in it are barking mad but great fun so I  had started work on that ages ago and I thought it might be worth having a look at again and found that I’d written far more of it than I’d thought and just basically updated it and took out all the Doctor Who references. At the point I’d gotten to, The Doctor and U.N.I.T. had not appeared, they’d been mentioned but not appeared, the idea was that U.N.I.T. was going to investigate but now the Graveyard Shift were, so I just carried it on and see where that goes.”

I know obviously we do talk about Doctor Who, you and I, it’s a joint love, if the offer came, would you write an episode?

BOB: “Funnily enough, I absolutely bite their hands off! Recently I wanted to submit to the Big Finnish short script – they had an open submission and I started writing a story for that which again was one that I’d had hanging around for a while, but I didn’t finish it. Whenever I think about writing for Doctor Who, I don’t think I’d know what I’d write, it’s weird.”

I know, I’ve had a story going around my head for the past three years that I want to do but it’s having the guts to do it because it is my greatest love.

BOB: “If you don’t do it rapidly, someone else will do it for you. If I had a good idea, I would love to but any idea that I’ve come up with has either been incredibly derivative or someone beats me to it. Back in the days when they were producing the missing adventures, get three quarters of the way through writing one which was supposed to tell the story of what happened to The Master between Frontier In Space and Deadly Assassin and they brought out one of the Dalek stories which did exactly the same thing and I had to scrap the whole lot, it was a good story as well, it had the Autons and everything but if the opportunity came along, I would absolutely kill for it!”

Thank you so, so, much! Thank you for letting me use up so much of your time!

BOB: “You’re more than welcome, it’s always a pleasure!”

Ian D. Hall